In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner discusses the importance of understanding and aligning with the five stages of small business growth, with a special look at what happens when you prematurely outsource or automate your processes.
What stage of small business growth are you currently in, and are you prioritizing the right actions for that stage? In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner discusses the importance of understanding and aligning with the five stages of small business growth, with a special look at what happens when you prematurely outsource or automate your processes. From the importance of validating your business idea to finding product-market-founder fit and building a solid foundation, Michelle provides invaluable insights to help you steer your business in the right direction and avoid the pitfalls that entrepreneurs often fall into.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into a trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering on sequence. Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. In every episode of this podcast, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business.
Crowdsourced Question from the Community
And today's question is a special one because not only is it crowdsourced again, meaning it's a question I hear over and over again on my monthly round tables, from clients, during sales calls, so I thought it was important to bring it here, but it's also a question that drives the entire foundation of Sequence Over Strategy. This is where I start. Every single client, day zero, this concept, this question is where we're starting. And it's the framework that I'm going to share with you is the framework I use to ground everybody that I talk to and where their basic priorities should be for their business. So this episode is an important one. This is as foundational as it gets, so I hope that it helps you. And here's the question.
“When somebody comes to get into a roundtable, to a client meeting, to anything that I'm doing and says, hey, should I do this or should I do that? And usually it's in the form of, I'm not sure if my product is ready. I'm not sure if my customers are solid. I'm not sure if it's time to hire. What should I do?”
So you can tell those are really big questions. And that's why we have to go to our most foundational frameworks to start to understand it. But these are also the most important questions because if you're not getting the sequence correct on the basic stuff, like the really 10,000 foot, 50,000 foot order in which you're going to do things, then the little stuff, it matters even less. And so we have to start with these big questions and give you a tool to use so that you can talk it down to size and start figuring out where you should be.
And like I said, this is such a foundational question and it comes in in the form of these unanswerable questions. And so that's why it's so interesting that they're those common questions because you're probably asking yourself all these questions as well. I call them this or that questions, right? Should I do this or should I do that at the really high level? And when you really literally feel like it's a toss-up. When you feel that way, when you're asking big questions like, I don't know if I should hire yet, or I don't know if my product's ready, or I'm not sure if I have my customers nailed down. To me, that's a giant red flag that you're not starting in the right place, right?
If you're still asking those questions, and those are natural questions to ask, I'm not saying you should never be asking those questions, but if you're still asking them in the context of asking yourself a should I do this or should I do that question, and the should I do this is like should I use this specific marketing strategy or should I try this, that's a red flag to me that you're not grounded in the right priorities. So first we have to go back and ground you, get you on some solid footing so that you can understand from where you are answering that question. Because questions can't and shouldn't be answered from the void. They need to be answered from a grounded place of knowing where you are.
Left or Right?
Listen, I'm a hiker, I'm a backpacker, so I use this analogy often. Like, what if I come up on a fork in the trail and had to decide right or left, right? By simply asking right or left, I have no context of the frame from which I'm making that decision. And out in the backcountry, choosing the wrong direction can literally become a life-threatening choice. So I better find some way to ground myself, right? I better not just sit there looking at the trail and say, left or right, let's hope I get lucky. I better find a way to ground myself, a.k.a. like get on a map before I choose that this or that, before I choose left or right. so that the map can give me some guidance.
And that's the same thing this episode is about here. Your business life can actually be on the ropes. If you're looking at a pair of options and saying this or that, should I go left? Should I go right? You don't want to make choices in that void. First, we need to find the equivalent of finding your map, figuring out where you are on the trail. So let's talk about how to do that.
To start answering this question, let's go back to the backpacking scenario. If I'm in the backcountry and I reach that fork in the trail and have to decide left or right, again, it is a really terrible idea to do that without some sort of framing device that's going to give me an idea of where I am. And I need that idea of where I am first before I make any choices. Because let's face it, in that scenario, I might be two to three days into a hike. So taking a wrong turn doesn't mean a 30-minute hike back. It can mean getting lost. It could mean days of confusion and really dangerous stuff.
And I'm being dramatic about this, but I hope you see the parallels. Because if you reach a fork in your business, that same kind of left or right question, and you sit there thinking your answer can mean nothing but looking in either direction and taking a good guess, you're very mistaken. Because if you choose the wrong direction, it's not going to put your life in danger, but it could put your business in danger. And it could definitely send you down a spiral where you're running around in circles for years trying to figure out why you're not making any progress.
And that statement right there, that wasn't being dramatic. I see this over and over again where folks just stay in this world of, oh, should I choose this or should I choose that? Should I, you know, again, try this marketing strategy or that one? And they really waste years running around in circles, just trying different things instead of taking two minutes to find some sort of map to ground themselves in, to give them a better frame from which to make that this or that decision. And I don't blame them. A lot of times it's because they don't know what frame is available to them.
And so that's what I wanna do here today is give you that framework, give you this idea so that you know where to start in answering these questions. So we don't have a typical map. We don't have a trail map and you can't go to REI and grab a trail map for business, right? So we have to look at ‘what do we have?’
The Five Stages of Small Business Growth
And the best tool that I have found for this is something that I call the five stages of small business growth. You may have heard me talk about this elsewhere. I talk about it a ton, but I really wanted to dedicate an episode to it. And the five stages of small business growth comes out of research that first came out of Harvard in 1983. So if you want to go find that original research, you can still do so. It is up there and it is published. What I'm going to share is an adaptation of that research that I have made given the small businesses that I work with today.
As you can imagine, much has changed from small business since 1983, right? And when Harvard was doing this research, they were looking at a much more traditional small business. Now we're talking about, you know, solopreneurs in the digital world. so it's a different scene, but the fundamentals still stand. And often when you're asking this or that, the answer lies first in knowing what stage of small business growth that you're in. Because what that research showed us was that we have five stages of small business growth, and every small business as it's growing is going to go through those stages in order.
Now, every business may not get through all five stages, and that's very normal. And we have very profitable businesses that never get past stage three, even some that never get past stage two. So it's not that you have to go through all five, but it is true that every small business that is relatively stable is going through these things in order. And that's the important part. That's the sequence over strategy: you want to know what stage of small business growth you are currently in so that you don't make the mistake of operating and making choices that would reflect a business that is in a stage that's ahead of you or a stage that's behind you.
There are a lot of people who stay stuck in a stage that they've actually moved on from, and that can keep you just as stuck as jumping ahead. So first, let me tell you about these stages, and then we'll apply them to a few real world this or that questions that I hear all the time. And heads up, I'm not going to get into stages four and five in this episode because 99% of the businesses that I work with are really within stages one through three. That doesn't mean that they don't go on to stages four and five, but this is a little bit of a complex topic. And so in order to keep this podcast really useful and digestible, I'm actually going to focus on the first three stages of small business growth and I'll link to a blog post where I get into stages four and five so that you can see that if you want to. We're really going to focus on stages one, two and three of the five stages of small business growth, because those tend to be the most applicable to folks who are listening to this podcast.
Stage 1: Validate
OK, so let's break them down again. We're talking about the five stages of small business growth. This is original research that came out of Harvard in the early 80s. but I have adapted it to the situations that you're in. So if you look up that original research, just know that I have changed the names of these stages again, so that they're applicable to the small businesses that we're talking about here, like the really small businesses, a lot of you operating in some way in the digital world. So stage one is the validate stage. And what you're trying to do here is exactly what it says. you are trying to validate that your business is useful in the market.
But there's a catch here. The validate stage is actually very short. We might look at the validate stage and think about that and envision something where everything has to be perfect. Until you leave the validate stage, you know, you can't leave it until you know who your customer is and what your product is and exactly how you're gonna provide those solutions. That's not true. The validate stage is a very fast stage within the context of all these stages and all you're trying to do is say, is my knowledge useful to the market in some way? Are they going to pay me for my knowledge, my services, whatever you're putting out there, my product? Does the market want it in some fashion?
It doesn't have to be a perfectly packaged thing yet. You don't need to know exactly who your customers are. You just need to know that you are generally useful to the marketplace, right? And I usually caution against being generally useful, especially in content creation. But in this case, when we're just looking at stage one, generally useful is the goal. Does the market generally find what you want to provide to be useful? If so, great, you have validated it. And why I share that is because it's such an insight into stage two. So the reason ‘why to validate’ is so short and relatively easy is because stage two is the sales stage.
Stage 2: Not so fast…
And let's talk about that one because stage two, not so quick. Because when I say sales stage, what do I mean? I mean that stage two is where you are going to accomplish finding repeatable and predictable marketing and sales success. So you do not graduate from stage two until you know exactly how to market to hit your sales goals. Now, that might sound like a simple statement. But if we really dig into it, there's a lot going on there. Because what does it take? What else needs to be in place in order to create predictable and repeatable sales? Hmm. Let's think about it. Cause there's quite a bit.
You need to know who your customer is. You need to know, especially if you're a micro business owner of, you know, one to two, even up to 10 folks in a business, you need to know that you like what you're doing. So in many ways, stage two is finding something that I call product market, founder fit. And if you're familiar with the startup space at all, the traditional tech space, you'll know that term product market fit. And that just means that you have found a product or a service and you found a market and they need each other. And that's usually the goal of a lot of companies to find product market fit.
But in my 15 years building small businesses, I have seen countless examples of people who have found product market fit and they're miserable. So we can't have that in the super small business space because you're spending too much time with your business, right? It's one thing if you were talking about a corporation of thousands of people and maybe somebody is not the biggest fan of the product to market fit, you know, they can work around that.
But if you're doing your own thing all day long, you better like what you're doing. You better like your customers and you better like the service that you're providing. So stage two, even though it's sales and the goal is technically to just find something that are predictable and repeatable marketing and sales. What that actually means is we want to find predictable and repeatable marketing and sales from a product or service that you enjoy delivering. That is that pesky founder fit.
And why am I talking about this? Well, this ties into why Validate is so fast. Because in Validate, there is this temptation. In that first stage, there's a temptation to sit there and try to get everything perfect. Oh I'm going to figure out exactly what customer I want to serve and with exactly this type of format of product or service and it's going to be great and then I can turn on the marketing machine. Guess what? That's not reality. And that's why we just want to make sure you're generally useful in the validate stage, because we need to get you into the sales stage as quickly as possible, because you are going to learn so many things about your preferences.
When you start trying to build predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, you are going to learn so much about your own preferences that you're going to make some changes. you're going to get halfway through the sales stage of building up predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, and you're going to realize you don't enjoy your product or service any longer. You don't enjoy the format in which you are delivering it. Or, and this one is very, very common, and it's okay to say it, you don't like your customers, and you don't want to spend that much time with them.
And so guess what? Over the course of building up predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, you have such exposure to your customers, such exposure to delivering your product, It forces you to really be in the trenches that you're going to figure everything out. And then you're going to have to make some decisions about changes you might want to make. And that's why we don't want to sit around and validate in this hypothetical world, figuring out the exact perfect format of how you're going to deliver something or the exact niche of who your customers are going to be, because it's not going to stay true. You're gonna figure out so much.
Once you go out into the world, you actually start building something up into predictable and repeatable sales. So much interaction is gonna happen with your market that you will make different choices than whatever you decided and validate. And that's why we don't wanna have you in this trap of perfection that you can't leave validate, right? So many people think, oh, I can't really put everything into marketing. I can't really put my message out in a really big way until I have all of this perfected. No, you just need to know that you have something that is sort of useful to the market. And then you have to get into the trenches in the sales stage and get out there and try to make it predictable and repeatable.
Because when you do that, you will figure out, the market will tell you, your own enjoyment will tell you whether you have that product market founder fit. And when you achieve that, and congratulations, this can take a couple of years, and you can be wildly profitable while you do this. So I don't want you to be discouraged when I say that the sales stage can last for years in some cases. Some of my creatives and multi-passionates who are always re-imagining themselves, they stay in sales for forever, and you can be profitable in that stage. It just means that you're always gonna be reinventing a little bit and putting something new out and going through a new cycle of creating predictable, and repeatable marketing and sales out of it.
But when you have reached the end of that stage, if you choose to reach the end of the stage and you find a combination that you enjoy and you can create predictable and repeatable sales, by which I mean you can predict what your cash flow is going to be over the next year, then you graduate to stage three, which is the foundation stage. And the foundation stage is when you go ahead and start really productizing everything that you've just discovered about what your sales, what your product market founder fit, what your model is going to be. This is when you start really writing in SOPs. This is when you start hiring for the skills that you know you need for your model. This is when you lay the foundation of what the company is going to really look like.
And this can also be surprising to people because some of the things in foundation are things we're told to do a lot earlier, right? Hire a team. Write standard operating procedures. Automate everything. As we get into some of the common questions that come up around this, I'll describe how it's not like you can't hire help earlier, right? And it's not like you don't want to have some efficiency in your business. But if you lock that stuff in too early, if you lock that stuff in before you really know what marketing works or before you really know what your own preferences are, Then you're going to lock in processes and procedures and feel responsible to a team for a business you discover you don't actually enjoy.
So you want to keep all that stuff certainly efficient. You don't want to be doing more work than you need to, but you want to keep it pretty open and you want to keep a culture of exploration and experimentation. Before you get to stage three if you're still in stage two, you don't want to be locking stuff down again. You want to be getting help, but you want to be careful about that help. You want to be careful about what kind of processes you automate so that you don't build a machine. You don't build a ship that's really hard to turn around.
I run into that often where I have folks who come to me who have jumped ahead to stage three and they have just really committed a lot of dollars time sweat energy and to big things and big commitments, big teams, and they realize they did it too early. They realize that it's not working. They realize that it's not creating predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, or they realize that they don't like the predictable and repeatable marketing and sales that they have created and they need to make big changes. But now they have a team on board, or now they have all of these resources committed. And it's really hard then to back away, really hard when you have that many sunk costs into something. And so we just want to keep things really light and flexible until you know that you have those predictable and repeatable sales doing something that you actually want to do.
Okay. As I said, I'm not going to get into stages four and five. We will link to the blog post that goes a little deeper into those, but I'm going to keep us focused on these stages one, two, and three, as we go through a few scenarios, because that is where most folks find themselves. So as we go into these scenarios, just a quick reminder that stage one is validate, where you're just trying to figure out, do you have something that the market's going to find useful?
Stage two is sales. And you're trying to create predictable and repeatable marketing and sales. And by doing so, making sure that you have found product, market, founder fit, aka you actually like what you're doing. And then stage three is foundation, where you are locking in everything that you discovered worked in stage two. And you're really locking that in, building a team and a culture around it, and you're ready to rock and roll.
So now that we know the stages, let's apply them to a couple of the most common questions I hear that are flags for me, that folks need to reprioritize, that maybe they're operating in the wrong stage. And by doing so, just setting themselves up for frankly, like years of slower progress than they need to be, because they're focused on the wrong thing. And I've alluded to some of these, but we're going to go through them anyway, because they're really important to understand the real world of how this comes up.
And the first one of these is, it's a little bit of a frustration of mine because I hear this so often. And that's a statement that comes in that I've heard I should only focus on what I'm great at and outsource the rest. Is that true and how do I do that? And this is a question I get from really early stage entrepreneurs way too often. There is thought out there that we should be outsourcing all the work that we don't enjoy. And while I understand where that comes from, if you're in the validate stage or you're in the early stages of sales and you're outsourcing everything, guess what happens? You're actually focusing on building your foundation way too early. Way, way, way too early and so you're either not going to have success because you're taking a bunch of people who are going to lock in a bunch of stuff before you even know if it works and you're going to find out it's not working but you've committed so many resources to it too early, or you are going to be in a situation that we talked about where you create a business you don't like, and then you're just going to burn out. And so it's not going to matter.
And so when you're thinking of this, I should only focus on what I'm great at and outsource the rest. Be really careful before you really commit to that and knowing what stage you're actually in. Because this is a phrase you should start saying to yourself, maybe halfway through the sales process, right? And you should definitely be saying this to yourself in the foundation stage.
So it's not that this is a wrong thought. It is just a thought that I see creeping up way too early. If you're saying this to yourself early on and validate when you're still trying to figure out if the market even needs your services way too early, you're investing way too much at that point in outsourcing and it's really gonna come back to bite you.
Also, if you're early in the sales stage and you're not sure what marketing is gonna work to actually create predictable and repeatable results, and you decide that you don't like marketing, so you're just gonna outsource your marketing, and you pick somebody who specializes in whatever they specialize in, because everybody has strengths and weaknesses.
Well, if you pick the wrong thing, now you're tying yourself to a team or to an individual and there starts to feel responsibility to that. And what if it doesn't work? Then you're always trying to find somebody new, somebody different to help you. I'm much more of an advocate of you, you know, getting some help. Again, it's not that you can't get help, but let's get help in an appropriate way so that you're not building up a team and you're not completely outsourcing. and frankly being oblivious to everything going on and instead you're paying attention to some of the experiments that you're running or you're being curious about what marketing might work and you're making sure that you're out there interacting enough so that you know if you're creating something that you like.
The Pitfall
So again, that question I get, ‘I've heard I should only focus on what I'm great at and outsource the rest. How do I do that?’ If you're asking that before you are in at least the second half of a sales and marketing stage, it's too early. It's just too early to be thinking that extreme about what you're outsourcing. Similarly, I get told a lot that I'm documenting and automating everything from day one because I don't want to waste any time and I want to make sure I'm efficient.
Your time is really valuable. And you know what I don't want you to do is to waste too much time, again, documenting and automating things that might not work or that you might decide you don't like. And so I see when people start documenting and automating and really getting into their SOPs and their processes, again, this is advice that gets shared because we do wanna respect our time and your time is valuable and you've started a business probably because you want to recapture some of your time, but if you start recapturing that time too early, what you end up doing is it's a short-term thinking because you're sacrificing long-term issues, right? You're gonna end up not getting to the finish line. It's going to take you a lot longer to get to the finish line if you focus on documenting things too quickly.
And again, that doesn't mean you shouldn't jot down how to do simple processes so you don't have to re-remember every time. You should absolutely do that. But I'm talking about really locking in automations and locking and spending all that time to build a lot of efficiency in your business before you're in at least, you know, the second half of the sales stage. Because if you're doing that too early, you're just locking yourself into something that may not work.
So we need to stay really experimental and creative and interested in the validate stage and in that first half of the sales stage. So if you are someone again who really early is automating a ton of stuff and you still have a lot of questions about what might work and you're not sure if things are going to be predictable and repeatable in terms of your marketing and sales, you're probably locking your processes in too early and you don't want to do that because again, it's gonna make it harder to turn the ship around. Sunk costs are a real thing, and sunk cost is just an economic term for time or money you've spent doing something, and how much harder it is to abandon those things, even though you may know that they're not working.
If you've put a lot of time and money into something, it's hard to let it go. And so what happens? If you get into building your SOPs, if you get into foundation stage activity before you have predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, then you're going to discover, oh, actually, this doesn't work or it's not working as well as it should, or I don't like my customers or I don't like what this product looks like. And you're going to end up having that information, but not acting on it. Because you will make excuses and you will say, oh, but I've put so much effort into this, or oh, but I've invested so much money into this, let's give it another month, see if something turns around.
And guess what, one month turns into six months, turns into a year, and I'm not being dramatic there, that's how long it happens. and when you let it keep going like that because there are sunk costs, then you are just slowing down any real progress and you're giving yourself a much more difficult job in the long run.
So again, when you're thinking in this way that you want to document everything early on in order to be efficient in the early days, guess what? Efficiency in the early days doesn't exist. So let yourself off the hook there and give yourself an opportunity to be experimental and to see what works and to see what you like. Again, remember product market founder fit is what we want to accomplish here. And then finally, I still get this all the time. And I've alluded to this earlier. I'm still figuring out exactly what my product or service is and who it's for. So I feel like I can't really move forward until I know that. And this is from folks who have been in business for a year, year and a half. And they're hesitant. They're saying, I'm not sure if I can move forward to try some new marketing or to really sink my teeth into something and try to get louder, try to share my message in a bigger way. Because they're saying, I'm still not really sure who my product or service is or who it's for.
What does that tell me? Tells me they're stuck in the validate stage after a year, year and a half. Friends, the validate stage, you should be out of that within six weeks. and on to trying your sales and marketing, right? Getting settled, because what does the sales stage do? It forces you. It forces you to try to find that predictable and repeatable marketing and sales, which forces you to take action in that direction. And the whole idea is to go out there and put it into the world. see who reacts, see who doesn't, because that's how you find product market founder fit, is by getting out there and seeing if you like those customers, seeing if they want the product or not, seeing if they want the service, seeing how they want you to shape the product or service. Right?
So often we feel like we have to figure out what the product or service looks like in our little cave and then put it out into the world. No, let your customers tell you, let your leads tell you what they want to buy from you and then start shaping from there and making sure that you enjoy that. That's what the sales stage is all about, right? That's what's finding predictable and repeatable marketing and sales is all about. It's about being able to be experimental and putting things out there in different combinations, right? Here's this service package and I'm selling it to you in this way. Does that work? Does that combination work to get me with a customer that I enjoy servicing? Awesome.
Like that's what the experiment is about. You're in a small business. It doesn't have to be perfect from day one, right? You don't have to know every single little detail. You just have to start putting something out in the world so that you can answer the big questions of the sales stage. you can answer those big product market founder fit questions and say, yes, I like this. No, I don't like this and adjust accordingly. You know, yes, this is working. No, it's not. You're never going to know that stuff and validate if you're just sitting back and trying to figure it out. So if you are a person who's feeling hesitant about putting things into the world, cause you're not exactly sure yet what your product or service looks like or who your customer is, put it out into the world.
That's step one of the sales stage. is starting to put it out into the world and getting some feedback to see if you like things or not. Okay so those are the five stages of small business growth here really the three stages of small business growth and I hope you can see that these stages of business growth and identifying which one you're in are really going to guide you as to where your big picture priorities should be.
If you're in stage one of validate your only priority is to make sure that you're useful to the market in some way and then to Get out of there and start working on the sales stage. If you're in the sales stage, your priority should only be about being curious about product market founder fit. Stop stressing about, you know, how are you going to build teams? How are you going to build mass efficiency? How are you going to build systems? I don't want to hear about it at that point.
If you can't tell me what your next six months, at least of sales projections look like, you should not be worried about foundational stuff. All you should be worried about is continuing to figure out what's the sales and marketing mix that's going to allow me to sell a product or service that I enjoy delivering. That's it. That's your priority. That's where 80% of your time should go, at least outside of client services, right? 80% of the time you're spending working on your business as opposed to in your business should be focused on navigating yourself through the sales stage. And if you've done that, if you have found product market founder fit, congratulations, that's amazing.
Then you should be thinking about doubling down on it, right? Let's build the team that can build that to whatever level you want to. Let's build the automations. Let's build the efficiency. It's like now it's time to grow. And you can see how that allows you to, going back to our original analogy, understand where you are on the trail. Are you going to go left or right? Right? Those ‘this or that’ questions. Should I do this or should I do that? become a lot easier to answer if at least you know what stage you're in.
So I'm going to invite you and we're going to link over to it. If you are curious about this, I have an extensive blog post walking you through how to identify what business stage you're at. And like I said, if you're even curious about stages four and five, if you're a person who feels like you're past foundation and you start thinking maybe about exits and such, we cover that in stages four and five.
I invite you to go over to that blog post, dig in a little bit more and see, are you operating in the right stage and tell me about it. We'd love to hear your reactions to this because it's just so, so, so important. So again, we're linking to that blog post. You all can always go over to themichellewarner.com. and find it as well. It's the five stages of small business growth and dig in a little further. Give yourself a little assessment and make sure you know what business stage you're in because from there you can understand where to take it. My friends, thank you as always for being here. I just appreciate you and I appreciate being able to show up here every other week and help you give you a little bit more perspective on how to navigate this changing business world because it's a big one.
And again, a reminder that if you haven't done it yet, I would invite you to please subscribe and even rate the show wherever you're listening. It makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. And if you have a question that you want me to answer on this podcast, head over to themichellewarner.com backslash SOS. You'll find a form there where you can submit a question and it would be my absolute pleasure to answer it for you on a future episode. I will see you right back here in two weeks. And in the meantime, please remember to prioritize your sequence over your strategies.